New ESSAYS QUITE OFTENNEW STORIES AND SONGSEVERY now and then

Today I had Yerba Mate tea. According to my friend Joe, it is a traditional tea that people drink in Argentina.

To drink Yerba Mate tea, you fill a cup with it, basically to the top. It looks a lot like catnip. Then you add water. Because you now have what looks, in your cup, like soaked catnip, it is necessary to drink it with a straw that works as a sort of a strainer. This straw is called a bombilla.

I’m noticing that as I’m writing this, I’m writing in clipped sentences. It’s kind of giving this essay the feel of one of those things that I used to read in front of class when I was in The second grade. You know: “I drank tea. I drank tea from Argentina. I drank tea from Argentina that’a called Yerba Mate.” That sort of thing.

Anyway, I think I know the reason for the clipped sentences. I will get to that in a moment.

Once you’re done drinking the tea, you fill the cup up again, and pass it to someone else, for Yerba Mate is a social drink. You can basically get about fifteen cups of tea out of a single one of these cups that’s filled to the brim with these leaves.

Anyway, Joe and I each had a cup or two, and then Joe went into the living room to do some work. I liked the tea, so I had a few more cups of it.

After a while, I began to notice that my sentences were getting shorter. I also noticed that I was hammering away at the keys, as if I wanted to drive my fingers though the keyboard to the table.

So I looked up Yerba Mate, and found out that it’s a heavily caffeine infused tea, and that ancient Argentinians called it The Drink of the Gods.

The world is a shimmering, shimmering place now. I feel an intense desire to pace around the house, rub my hands together, and make plans. Big plans. About what, I don’t know. But they’re plans.

While making these plans, it just feels appropriate to start muttering “oh, yes, oh, yes, oh yes,” and to start cackling wildly. For they are big plans. Big, big plans. Huge plans.

I am chewing on my thumbnail. It is a good feeling.

There is a voice in my head, at the moment, saying “Yorba Mate, man…Yorba Mate. This stuff is great. Really great.”

Anyway, I have things to do, places to go. What exactly I’m going to do, I’m not exactly sure. Where, exactly, I’m going to go, I don’t know either.

​But I will do these things, and go to these places.

When I go to these places and do these things, they will no doubt inspire me to go to other places, and do other things. I think that I shall rub my hands together furtively as I do this. Perhaps I shall say “oh yes,” as these things occur.